Western Civilization is a college
course invented by a claret-stained don
whose half-remembered Greek and passing knowledge
of the Gothic, Punic Wars, and Aragon
lulled the drowsy Bridesheads of the year of nine-
teen something into a vague embrace of beauty,
truth, and another glass of fortified wine:
then told themselves they had a solemn duty
to the plays they hadn’t read; basilicas
they found a little gaudy; philosophers
forgotten once they’d lost the syllabus;
spoken Latin; naval officers.
In town, Idomeneo, King of Crete
plays to an opera house of empty seats.

By the time you’re thirty-five you should have loved
one or two emotionally stunted men,
broken up, and immediately done it again.
You should have had a plantar wart removed.
You should have stood too soon and furiously shoved
your way off of a crowded plane. You should have ten
single unmatched socks. Most of your friends
should be better off, do yoga, self-improve
while you’re still at the bar five nights a week,
still smoke when you drink too much, get stoned, and tweet,
sill plan to plan to write a book, still drive
the car you bought at twenty-six, still seek
sensations strong enough to mask defeat.
You don’t tell anyone you’re thirty-five.

We need a Disney Princess who one night
awakes in a sweat in her vast, cold bed to find
a prickling guilt in the back of her lovely mind:
what she has inherited is neither just nor right;
out in the fields of wheat, the peasants’ plight
is that his labor and his wealth are unaligned;
the commons closed, his status thus declined—
the owners took the surplus. Where Princess might
once have called the maid for milk and gone
back to bejeweled dreams and tiny snores,
this time she rushes to the palace’s marble stairs,
cries to the dawn that there will be a dawn,
princes brought down to raise up beggars and whores,
collective ownership, and headless heirs.

Democracy dies in dankness. A ring of smoke,
it goes wafting to the ceiling of the studios
you share with several twenty-something bros
you sort of knew in college; another toke,
and then the conversation turns baroque:
what if all the mind believes it knows
is just a holograph? can we suppose
that Croatan were aliens at Roanoke?
What were we saying? Yes. Democracy.
Boy-fucking Plato thought it was a bad
idea, mostly, prone to demagogues;
reason crowded out; stupidity
inevitably ascendant; even a mad
king better than a congress of rabid dogs.

“The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awful to me,” said Claudia Ward, who lives in 15 Broad Street and was among a group of neighbors who denounced the plan at a recent meeting of the local community board. “It’s too easy for someone to slip through. And I just don’t want my family and my neighbors to be the collateral on that.”

Let me tell you about the very rich.
They hate their children and live in glass towers.
The simplest pleasures are beyond their meager powers
of imagination; mostly, they like to bitch
about the minor incursions of normal life, the itch
of unsanctioned human contact, the fleeting sour
stench of the breathing millions they’ll rush to shower
off in their marble hangars. A muddy ditch
or a modest home appear as misery
defined; they do fear violence of a certain kind,
not terrorism, but a reborn Terror
without the killing—like, meeting the delivery
boy, or paying cash, or waiting in line.
Mere human contact is their Robespierre.

I’ve been thinking about one of the main criticisms that has crept in under the rapturous—over-rapturous, if you ask me—praise for Luca Guadagnino’s movie adaptation of Call Me by Your Name, which is that it shyly looks away from all the gay fucking. After all, it’s a famously sexy book. “This novel is hot,” as Stacey D’Erasmo’s book review memorably began. But in retrospect, though I love the novel, it’s studiously euphemistic in many places: compared to all the detailed cocks and “little stoppered farts” of a Hollinghurst novel, say, Call Me often has a rather pre-lib sensibility about the facts and mechanics of gay sex, something more in common with a mid-century author like Mary Renault than with post-seventies gay literature. This isn’t always the case; Aciman occasionally does describe the mechanics of getting fingered in the butt, but many of the book’s sexiest bits are in fact gauzy and lovely rather than rough and raw, even if they do not, as Guadagnino version does, literally pan away from the lovers to the softly rustling trees.

Here, for instance, is the core description of the first time in which Oliver and Elio fuck:

[…] At some point I realized he’d been naked for a long while, though I hadn’t noticed him undress, but there he was, not a part of him that wasn’t touching me. Where had I been? I’d been meaning to ask the tactful health question, but that too seemed to have been answered a while ago, because when I finally did find the courage to ask him, he replied, “I already told you, I’m okay.” “Did I tell you I was okay too?” “Yes.” He smiled. I looked away, because he was staring at me, and I knew I was flushed, and I knew I’d made a face, though I still wanted him to stare at me even if it embarrassed me, and I wanted to keep staring at him too as we settled into our mock wrestling position, his shoulders rubbing by knees. How far we had come from the afternoon when I’d taken off my underwear and put on his bathing suit and thought this was the closest his body would ever come to mine. Now this. I was on the cusp of something, but I also wanted it to last forever, because I knew there’d be no coming back from this. When it happened, it happened not as I’d dreamed it would, but with a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal. I had an impulse to stop him, and when he noticed, he did ask, but I did not answer, or didn’t know what to answer, and an eternity seemed to pass between my reluctance to make up my mind and his instinct to make it up for me.

Now, I’m going to be very crass and do some translating, because I think it draws into focus just how elliptical this description really is. Oliver and Elio are in bed together. Oliver has already undressed Elio just prior to the excerpted passage. Elio is so overcome in the moment that he doesn’t really realize that Oliver has stripped too, until he does. “[N]ot a part of him that wasn’t touching me.” That’s a dick, surely. Then “the tactful health question.” Another minor criticism of the movie is that it doesn’t talk about HIV/AIDS, though it’s set right at the panicked beginning of the epidemic, but here, in the novel, Elio does ask. The tactful question is probably something along the lines of, “Are you clean?” (A lousy euphemism itself, derogatory-by-insinuation, but people still ask it even in our less panicked, supposedly more enlightened moment.)

After that, a “mock wrestling position, his shoulders rubbing my knees.” Reader, that’s a sixty-nine if I ever heard one. And then, “it happened” with “a degree of discomfort that forced me to reveal more of myself than I cared to reveal.” That is to say, Oliver starts to put his dick in Elio’s ass; it hurts more than Elio expected; Elio hesitates and quails a bit; Oliver senses it and asks if he should stop; Elio doesn’t answer; Oliver doesn’t stop. By the way, between the tactful question and the swift movement to “when it happened,” the strong implication is that they are having bareback sex.

This kind of clinical detail can make for good sex writing (Hollinghurst) and bad sex writing (Bill O’Reilly), so I don’t want to imply any sort of inherent moral or aesthetic value to either its presence or its absence, but I do think that its absence in the text is interesting. The mind races ahead of the exact content of the words and fills in the blanks. Elio’s dreams of this moment have been—with one very notable exception—dreams of submission; he at one point imagines wrapping his legs around Oliver “like a woman.” (I am obliged to say that there’s nothing inherently submissive about the receptive position in sexual intercourse, but that’s very plainly Elio’s sense of the image.) So we read the passage and fill in the details: he is on his back on the bed, and Oliver is on top of him and inside of him.

The film is shier yet; it really does look away with a sort of Hays Code demureness, and that is part of the critique, because earlier in the movie, it somewhat (though really only somewhat) more explicitly shows Elio having sex with a woman. I notice, though, that it isn’t all that different in the book:

There was nothing between our bodies but our clothes, which was why I was not caught by surprise when she slipped a hand between us and down into my trousers, and said, “Sei duro, duro, you’re so hard.” And it was her frankness, unfettered and unstrained, that made me harder yet now.

It’s not Penthouse Forum, but it’s not a “mock wrestling position” either.

The actual erotic heart of the novel consists of the pair’s trip to Rome, in which their relationship reaches a pitch of increasingly erotic desperation (including a scene of what I will gingerly call sensual defecation that seemed to confound certain book reviewers) driven by the fact that the trip marks the end of Oliver’s stay in Italy and their therefore inevitable impending separation. The movie elides most of this episode and sets it elsewhere—to me, a much more unusual and questionable choice than replacing anal sex with an image of summer foliage. Nevertheless, I think the criticism of the movie for its delicate treatment of the young men’s first lovemaking is unfair: the movie is truer in spirit to Aciman’s original text than the criticism suggests.

The movie does have other problems than these, though. The script is uneven, and where it draws dialogue directly from the book, it stumbles. “Look, we can’t talk about such things. We really can’t.” What sounds poetic on a page in a context of slowly unspooling Proustian recollection sounds, in the mouth of the game but miscast Arnie Hammer, merely weird, choked out in the husky tones of a Merchant-Ivory flick. (By the way, you do know who wrote the screenplay…) Elio’s father, in the book a caring but also distant and intimidating figure, “the great man,” who does not like to be corrected, is in the movie rendered as a sort of ingenious gnome, skipping and smiling. The physical chemistry between Chalamet and Hammer is itself all wrong—nothing about them yearns, and while Chalamet’s final scene is a masterpiece of physical acting, I cannot help but think that casting these two straight boys was finally a mistake. I am not for sexual typecasting, but I wonder if any twenty-something straight guy can really know—and therefore replicate—what it feels like to be a teenage boy in the flush of realizing that a man like you wants you as well: the dread and anticipation it engenders within you, the reckless hope that if you sit near enough your knees may “accidentally” touch. This is what Aciman’s oblique and elusive prose manages, even as it too occasionally looks to the trees: it remembers what it all felt like. The film does not.

There aren’t many problems Hollywood couldn’t solve by hiring me to fix all of their scripts. Now, as a caveat: I really enjoyed The Last Jedi. It was fun. It had three really good performances. It was often visually arresting. But it wasn’t good, and that’s because it had a lousy screenplay. So here, spoilers, I’m going to fix it for them.

The good story is Benicio del Toro’s character, who a lot of folks disdained as a needless B-plot distraction, a weird device met at random in search of a different device, trusted for no reason by a couple of other characters, and hauled through forty minutes of distraction only to peter out in an anticlimactic recapitulation of the Lando Calrissian bait-and-switch from Empire. But Benicio is interesting, and not only because he has a huge screen presence that entirely outshines the dim John Boyega and the desperately underwritten Kelly Marie Tran. Hey, he says, you cruel, violent idiots, Rebels and First Order, have been grinding the galaxy beneath your endless stupid war since the Rebellion and Empire ground the galaxy beneath its endless and stupid war thirty fucking years ago! And he’s right.

That, of course, is also the interesting—and abandoned—idea underneath the Kylo/Rey relationship, the other good performances here: that Kylo is not entirely bad, and Rey is not entirely good. That there’s a spark between them, some frisson, a kind of passionate compassion. That a thousand generations of elder conflict seem suddenly gray and less-than-heroic due to the telepathic instragramming of a conflicted millennial and her fuccboi counterpart.

Well, here’s how you’d make a good movie out of it. You’d start it in the same place: the rebels on the run and the order in pursuit, but you’d rewrite the pairings. Poe Dameron, this series’ Han Solo, is in desperate need of a romantic foil. He is the one who’s grown disillusioned with the Rebellion, with imperious Leia and her stupid orders, with the endless battles he’s called upon to fight, with his friends who keep dying for no reason, to no end. He is the one who’s angry at the loss of all those heroes in the attack on the dreadnaught: good men and women, comrades in arms. This makes his pairing with Rose, a true believer, on a last-ditch effort to find one guy, who turns out to be Benicio, really work; this gives it tension: Poe and Rose are deeply attracted to one another, and she thinks he’s a hero, but he is wracked by doubt and really wants to run away. And when, at last, Benicio shows him that the same guys are selling weapons to both sides of this terrible war, it breaks him, setting up his arc for the next inevitable movie.

Finn is paired up with Leia, the Phasma-less acolyte finding a new matriarch into whom he can pour his new-found zealotry. Leia has been hardened and radicalized by forty years of war. She’ll risk it all; she’ll do anything, compromise anything to win. She is the one who sends Poe and Rose on the suicide mission. Luke is gone; Han is gone; she has nothing to live for but the war. Finn is her Ren; she operates in parallel to the evil Supreme Leader. She’s Picard from First Contact, a powerful Ahab whose many losses to the Empire and First Order have hardened her. She’s a general, not a princess. Laura Dern (or, as she should be known in-universe: Vice Admiral Lorah Durn), is the call-back to the original Princess Leia: noble but kind; a hopeful realist. Her big role isn’t coming until the next movie anyway.

Luke, Rey, and Ren are all the same. Luke is defeated and broken. Rey and Ren are powerful but lost, the children of failed teachers and parents who both sense that the orthodoxies of the older generations are a lie.

The plot works the same way, except it’s Leia who sends Poe and Rose on the probably suicidal mission to find the guy who ends up being Benicio del Toro (Lorah Durn thinks it’s a baaaaad idea). We end the film with the rebels on the run, getting picked off one by one. Luke is back on his island moping. Kylo Ren still kills Snoke; he and Rey still fight the red samurai dudes; Ren says to Rey, “Join me, and we’ll start anew.” She says no. “You’re nobody,” he said, “but not to me.” He reaches out his hand. She hesitates for just a moment, and then she takes it. Cut to credits.

We’ll call this the room of love. In this room, you get to know someone and a spark is struck,
e.g., your research assistant’s down to fuck,
and your marriage, each bitter workday’s-end exhumed
for dinner’s silent paces, then re-entombed,
is done—you haven’t told your wife, but luck
may intervene; she’ll find some other schmuck
to love, right? Sex is the bud that blooms
through every season that does not accrue
to years as age; sex is an intimation
of immortality, for him at least;
why harass when you can simply do
a book together? It stinks of limitation,
a rough but two-backed slouching beast.

One like equals one unpopular
opinion: the movie was not good; the meal
was overpriced, but the Bordeaux blanc, a steal;
the chef was not the sky, crepuscular
and bright at once, the clouds as muscular
as the best dog, the half-moon a wheel
cracked yet rolling; you kiss him, you feel
nothing, although he looks spectacular
in his sandwich; somewhere a cat does nothing at all
and is not photographed; the song you said
was better than Bach was never sung; the earth
is flat in two dimensions; a fieldstone wall
is not a neighbor; oh, heart, you’ve beat and bled
out to be the measure of my worth.

We must never, ever take anything down.
Build on top of the built world, accrete
and do not pare; fill every ordered town
with statues of its residents, and choke the streets
with statues of the statues of the statues till they drown
all empty space beneath a solid sheet
of human matter; burst the borders; frown
at the vast wilderness, incomplete
without commemorating plaques
and towers named after long-dead architects
and roads to nowhere and great retaining walls
retaining other walls; let Atlas’ back
break; he can no longer shrug, his neck
has also snapped. We’ll build a statue to his fall.